Alex Rosenberg

On his book The Atheist's Guide to Reality

Cover Interview of November 07, 2011

In a nutshell

Most people think of atheism as one big negative. But there is much more to atheism than knockdown arguments that there is no God.

There is the whole rest of the worldview that comes along with atheism. It’s a demanding, rigorous, breathtaking grip on reality, one that has been vindicated beyond reasonable doubt. It’s called science.

The scientific worldview requires atheism. It can’t be an accident that 95 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Science (along with their foreign associate members) don’t believe in God.

But science also enables atheists to answer all of life’s universal and relentless questions. Some of the answers it provides are disconcerting. Several are surprising. But they are all as certain as the science on which our atheism is grounded.

So why aren’t scientists more up-front about these answers that we can read right off of science? Mainly because the answers are bad PR for science in a nation of churchgoers.

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016